A is for Acceptance...Acceptance of my hair

A to Z Challenge .... Letter A

A is for Acceptance .......Acceptance of my hair

"You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair," said Anne reproachfully. "People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is."- Anne to Marilla in Anne of Green Gables

When my mother was pregnant with me she used to fight with her sisters, as sisters often did. And one of the 'low blows' my aunt would hurl at my mom was " I hope you have a boy with flaming red hair" this of course would throw my mother into a full on rage since she did not want a boy and especially not one with flaming red hair. So flash forward a couple months and out comes her baby girl with a head full of flaming red hair...enough hair that the nurses in the maternity ward would put a little bow in it (which my mother would promptly pull out and smooth down my hair each time they did it haha) . So i believe that my hated of my red hair started in utero and continued for years. I would hate in school being called carrot head or bozo the clown or being asked over and over if i was going to try out for the play ANNIE.... I loathed my hair...even when I started going to the hair salon with my mom and i had women fawning over it. The hair stylists telling me that women paid a lot of money for my color and I should be happy, but of course I wasn't. I had no appreciation for it. My mother sat me down and tried to make me feel better about my hair by telling me a story about what happened when I was a infant. My mother was friends with woman who lived in our building and she was from Pakistan. One day her family had come from Pakistan to visit and was in the house when my mother and i stopped by for a visit. The women stood, eyes wide and staring at me . My mother said one took me from my mother and they all stood around me touching and kissing me and singing. My moms friend explained to my mother that they are amazed because they never saw anyone with my hair color. The believed I was good luck so they kept touching me. Even though I liked to hear the story , it still didn't make me love my hair anymore. So I just dealt with it like paying taxes or doing laundry until one day working at a job during college I had a woman staring at me. She stared for about 15 mins until I gave her a nasty look and then she came up to me. She went on to tell me that she was a artist and she was sorry that she was staring but she had never seen a hair color like mine. She went on to explain that she sees strands of gold and copper and deep red and light red and she was amazed by it. I smiled and thanked her and I have to say from that day on i saw my hair in a different light . I started to appreciate it, I started to notice other redheads and I started noticing people noticing it, which made me happy. It took some years but soon i was accepting of it ...and dare i even say, appreciating it... Now I am grateful to have these fiery locks...wearing them proudly ..honored to be among the company of other famous red headed women such as Lucille Ball, Queen Elizabeth I, Lizzie Bordon(hehe) and there a even reports that Marilyn Monroe was born a redhead. ...now if I could just learn to accept that I don't have thick luscious hair instead of my thin hair ...but one thing at a time haha :)